Day in the Life

Yo yo yo, readers! It’s time for… day in the life! I always like these posts, because I get to ramble to my heart’s content. This’ll probably be my only post like this this summer, because I’ve gotten settled and the next seven weeks will retain the same pattern :).

So, a day—or more precisely, Monday through Friday—in Monica’s life.

Work weeks start on Monday, when I wake up at around 8:30am, get dressed, and grab an assortment of things before heading out the door. I need my M.I.T. ID to get back into the dorm in the evening, I need my Harvard ID to get on the bus to Harvard Medical School, I need my laptop because I spend six plus hours a day on my laptop (it’s my single most prized possession, really, though I cheat on it by backing up all of its data to the cloud), I need a sweater because labs are universally chilly, I need lunch, a water bottle, and a pencil, and I grab my new tablet because I’m reading “Anathem” on its Kindle app and my new tablet is awesome. Thus packed, I run over the bus stop, watch the bus pull away as I get there (well, the last two days :)) and only have to wait ten minutes for the next one. And after joining the ranks of every other person who is ignoring their fellow bus-riders in favor of mobile devices (or tablets!), I arrive at the towering, stalwart white-stoned buildings of Harvard Medical School.

My hallway of HMS is filled with lovely friends and acquaintances; I greet the latter if I pass them and join the former in the two Conway lab rooms. The first Conway lab room is filled with: Kaitlin (our lab manager), Galina (our soon-departing lab manager), Mela (our post-doc), Jane (a recent Wellesley graduate working for pay until she leaves for medical school as well), lots of electrophysiology and psychophysics equipment, and computers. The exact ratio of these components vary based on exactly how early in the morning it is.

Though I was a component of this room last summer, this summer I don’t do much more than say hello, get updated on anything Kaitlin wants to tell me, and walk back out of Conway Lab Room #1. My room is down the hall, with its own members :).

Conway Lab Room #2 has a similar number of computers, and contains the four undergraduates (that’s me, Eileen, Galen, and Evelyn: we are “the students”). Josh, our computer guy, also works here—and to him I am eternally grateful, because without him I would spend this summer wrestling with software systems. Not that this summer isn’t absent in computer-wrestling: our lab’s server is currently down, and much of the lab’s work has ground to a jumbled halt. Sadly, I have been unable to work on the diffusion MRI project I am collaborating on with a graduate student at MIT. But fear not! There is always stuff to do in lab, especially for students armed with MATLAB :).

For a brief overview, the Conway Lab is interested in how color vision works in the brain. We use three techniques to address this question: fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), electrophysiology, and psychophysics. fMRI is a method that tracks blood flow over time in order to infer which areas of the brain are active in response to a given stimuli (like seeing color on a computer monitor). Electrophysiology is a method that allows you to collect neural spiking data—i.e. record the electrical signals from neurons. Psychophysics is a fancy word for behavioral studies.

Since our computer system is down, we are mostly unable to analyze fMRI data. Moreover, you have to be specially trained to do the actual work of collecting electrophysiology and psychophysics data in our lab. That leaves us undergraduates with tasks we can do with MATLAB (a computer programming language): either coding up a new psychophysics task regarding color memory, or analyzing electrophysiology data about the effect of brightness on color tuning. I’m working on the electrophysiology data.

As an aside, I recently discovered how unusual it was for people to know MATLAB. The MIT program I’m a part of does “technique nights” on Thursdays, where a few students present ten-minute-long descriptions of a specific technique their lab uses (I did mine on fMRI last week). This Thursday, Eeshit presented on MATLAB, and when he asked how many of us knew it already, four out of the forty of us raised our hands. I was stunned: as I’m always surrounded by people who know MATLAB (the people in my lab), I never consider it anything unusual. And at one point during another presentation, when Paloma was describing how she was doing image statistics with MATLAB, I turned to Alicia and whispered, “Sounds like so much fun.” Alicia laughed, then paused, frowning at me. “Wait, you’re serious,” she said, as a new grin started to appear.

So at work I’m on my computer until about six p.m., fussing with the code and the ideas I’m trying to implement. MATLAB isn’t a programming language designed to run computers; rather, it’s specialized for data analysis. My favorite part is knowing exactly what comparison I want to run (the firing rate for saturation versus brightness stimuli, for example), and then sorting through the matrices of data and organizing it so the computer will run it for me. The hard part is coming up with those comparisons, and I spent a long time staring at the window thinking, which I only realize when I notice that I haven’t heard anyone typing in a while.

Aside number two: Since hanging out with members of this program, which is mostly biology students with some neuroscience students, I’ve developed a new appreciation for wet labs. Or, more specifically, how much the people in wet labs enjoy their work. “Wet labs” can be distinguished from “dry labs” in that wet lab students use chemicals and biological reagents to do their research, while dry labs mostly do theoretical or computational work. Wet labs use conceptually mind-blowing techniques that are nonetheless hands on: growing cells, running gels, injecting fluorescent tracers, extracting proteins, and a myriad other collection of molecular methods. My friend Tiffany loves that stuff, but I couldn’t understand why she just wouldn’t want to write a little computer script instead.

Now that I’ve run into so many other peers who are passionate about wet lab techniques—who couldn’t imagine sitting in front of a computer all day—the appeal makes sense to me in a way it didn’t at Wellesley. I’d still rather work on a computer, but the wet lab sentiment is somehow more legitimate in my eyes, because I know so many more people who endorse it. Just like the MATLAB situation, I think that sometimes I just really need to get out of my little circle of labmates, who define what I think of as “research”. Reevaluate what the norm is, hear what it’s like in other labs, in other countries and in other states, in the larger world.

(Aside over.) Around six I take the bus back to home base: MIT’s McCormick Dorm. Maybe I’ll eat first dinner while I’m pulling my gym clothes on, or run into some other program students along the way. Regardless, you’ll find me on the third floor of MIT’s athletics center in the evening, with my tablet placed on the elliptical in front of me. Sometimes I don’t even get to read it, because Julio or Conan’s running on the treadmill next to me, and we’re discussing graduate school or our research.

Then it’s back to McCormick for a shower, and second dinner in the dining room. There I’ll probably see Candace, Gaby, Pablo, Matt, Vanessa, Vivian, or Jenna. If there’s a game of the World Cup on, they’ll all be in the there; elsewise, whoever happens to be eating dinner at the time. We’ll be in there for a few hours, chatting.

At night I’ll take the five steps back to my room, and do an hour of GRE preparation. The GRE is very similar to the SAT, except it’s the entrance exam for graduate school. I’m really, really enjoying studying for it. Though most of the required vocabulary for the Verbal section peaked in use during the 1800s, new words are still neologisms, and inchoate, dissemble, and ingenuous (which is different from ingenious) are still blowing me away. This weekend and next weekend, most of us are enrolled in a GRE prep course that involves eight hours of study every weekend. When there’s so many of us all working on it, for me it’s just become fun.

Then I’ll read before I go to sleep, and wake up for the new day :).